What’s in Your Food?
We explore the ready meal industry and investigate the raw cost of ingredients to try and assess what is going into the meals you’re eating and whether it’s healthy and nutritious.
Have you ever wondered what’s in your food? At Meals, our primary goal as a meal prep company was to create a great service but it was only when we started calculating the cost of putting real food into a ready meal that it became clear that whatever is going in to other ready meals can’t be nutritious and must be of very questionable quality. In this article, we explore this further to try and understand what it is we’re eating when we order a ready meal.
Understanding what’s in your food
Every ready meal, whether that be a supermarkets own brand, like Tesco’s Finest, or a ready meal delivery company, like Frive, is required to inform you of the ingredients in their meals and the nutritional values of those ingredients. You’d therefore think it would be easy to understand and assess if those meals are health and nutritious or not.
The truth is, the quality of ingredients and as such, what those ingredients really are, is a lot more complicated than just a name on a label. We’ve probably all cooked a chewy chicken breast that loses half its weight when cooked because it’s pumped with water or alternatively gone to a restaurant and tasted the most succulent piece of chicken. The question we should be asking is not what ingredients is in our meal, but rather what’s in the ingredients.
The simple way to do this is to look at the cost of the ingredients itself.
Working out the cost of ingredients
At Meals, we’re 100% transparent about the cost of ingredients because we tell you exactly how much it cost as you pay for your Meals service in two amounts.
- Cost of Service – this is how long your personal chef spends shopping, cooking and cleaning down in your kitchen. This is how we make our money as a business.
- Cost of Ingredients – this is, quite simply, the cost of your ingredients plus a 5% shopping fee which helps us cover some of the raw costs and variables involved in purchasing your ingredients for you.
So each week you can look at your meals and the total cost of ingredients and see how much your food costs. If you ever want the exact cost breakdown per dish, then just ask us and we will let you know.
If you ask us to shop at Tesco, the average raw cost of the food in a medium portion of a main meal is around £4.50 and on average this provides about 700 kcal. But to be clear, the dishes vary substantially depending on what you are looking for. If you were to ask us for all organic ingredients then that average raw cost will rise to £9.00 per meal.
Reflecting on this, you’ll see that real ingredients, that you find on the shelves in your supermarket, isn’t cheap and if you add in the cost of your time to cook it then the overall cost of eating well, and being healthy, is a significant investment of time and money. We discuss this in more detail in the article ‘weekly cost of hiring a chef‘.
Therefore, it costs, on average, £4.50 in raw ingredients from an average supermarket for an average meal of around 700 kcal, if you have no special requirements for those ingredients e.g. organic or free range.
Why do calories matter?
We mention calories because you may notice that most ready meal companies offer meals with only around 500 kcal. If you consider the average man needs 2000 kcal a day, then if the average man was to have 2 ready meals a day he’d be 1000 kcal short. As such, he’d be hungry and this could lead to him snacking which is often where we can pick unhealthy options with lots of calories.
At Meals, as a meal prep service we try to provide meal options which can satisfy you and have high protein so you feel less inclined to reach for naughty snacks. On your Meals portal you also have a breakdown of the total nutrition you’re getting each day from your meals and you can set targets for yourself too.
Ready Meal Comparisons
We’ve talked about the real cost of food so let’s now look at some standard ready meal options.
Ready Meal Delivery companies:
There are a number of options when it comes to ordering your ready meals online such as Frive, Simmer and Prep Kitchen. Looking at their pricing, if we wanted to get 2000 calories a day we’d need around 4 meals per day from them.
On average, their current pricing (as of 8th October, 2o24) is between £83 and £86 for 3 days (12 meals). This includes delivery which they see is ‘free’. Let’s therefore call it £85 for the Meals or £7 per meal or £28 per day to cover all your calories.
So how much of this cost is ingredients? Well they will incur a delivery cost, lets call it £5 and they have packing, lets call this £0.25 per meal. Therefore, that £85 is down to £77.
Next we have the labour of cooking the dishes, or the chefs time. Their meals will be mass produced each week so they will be very efficient at producing each dish and they won’t need experienced high level chefs to do this. It seems reasonable that in mass production setting it could be possible to prep, cook and box 15 meals per chef per hour so let’s say £1 per meal for chefs time. We’re now down to £65 or £5.40 per meal.
Well this seems like a good food budget for just 500 calories, but we’re forgetting a few things. We have all the overheads of the company, the commercial kitchen, the marketing teams, website development, customer services teams and on and on and on and finally the business needs to turn a profit after all of that.
The reality is, if we look at the restaurant model of 25/75, that is 25% of the cost of what you pay for food in a restaurant is put towards the ingredients, then it is likely that if you are paying £7 per meal, the ingredients makes up at the very most £1.75 of the cost of that meal.
And we get it, these meals need to be affordable and the business has a huge amount of challenges to get that meal to you but at £1.75, the fact is the quality of the ingredients being purchased will be falling well below the standard you see in Aldi or Lidl, the UK’s cheapest supermarkets.
Therefore, the reality is that if you are purchasing ready meals for £7 per meal to your door then it is a real push to describe these meals as nutritious or healthy.
Supermarket Ready Meals:
Considering the above example, if you walk into any supermarket and reach for their ‘finest’ range, you’ll normally find a price tag of £4.00 – £5.00. We don’t need to drag you through the same logic above to make our point here. The budget on ingredients in any supermarket ready meal is so low that you have to question can the ingredients in those meals even be considered food when it probably costs less than £1 per portion.
Summary
As a business, we fully emphasise with the challenges any business faces especially in the food industry. As such, if people are short of time and have limited budgets, ready meal delivery services do what they can to save you time on a budget.
However, it does concern us that health and nutrition are highlighted as benefits of these meals when we’re unable to find a source of ingredients, that would be acceptable to feed to our customers, for even twice the price of the probable cost of ingredients going in to these ready meals.
Therefore, it is important for everyone to be aware of the simple facts behind the economics of food production and how much good ingredients really costs.
So next time you go to buy some food from the supermarket to make yourself a meal, take a look at the receipt and if you go to pick up a ready meal consider what that ingredients is and where it is coming from at that price.
At Meals, it’s clear to us from the percentage of our members asking for organic food that the quality of ingredients is important to them and that the time our chefs invest into making their meals is valued. But at all times our members have the transparency of knowing exactly where their money is going and whether it’s worth it to you.
